U.s., Canada In Cold War Over Who Rules The Arctic Waters

August 18, 1985|By Janet Cawley, Chicago Tribune.

TORONTO — The voyage of a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker through the historic Northwest Passage has left Canadian nationalists hopping mad, the government in Ottawa embarrassed and again raised the issue of who, if anybody, owns the Arctic waters.

In the end, the diplomatic dilemma raised by the just-completed two-week trip may be more difficult to navigate than the waters themselves.

At issue is who has sovereignty over the frigid waterway, long sought by early explorers but then ignored by shippers when it didn`t prove a feasible route to the Orient. Canada claims the Arctic waters as its own, and that the Northwest Passage is an internal waterway, like the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The United States claims it is an international waterway, joining two oceans (the Atlantic and the Beaufort Sea) and open to all nations.

Therein lies the genesis of a very icy dispute.

The opening salvo was fired this summer when the U.S. announced that the icebreaker Polar Sea was being sent from Thule, Greenland, through the Northwest Passage to Point Barrow, Alaska. The route was chosen, U.S. authorities said, because it cut several weeks off the travel time required if the ship had gone through the Panama Canal.

But the important thing was that the news of the Polar Sea`s voyage came in the form of an announcement, not a request for permission to use the passageway. In effect, Washington presented Ottawa with a fait accompli.

The Canadian government, apparently hoping to salvage as much face as possible, turned around and announced it was ``authorizing`` the voyage, though no authorization had been sought.

By the time the Polar Sea set off from Greenland on Aug. 1, a number of Canadians, ranging from private citizens to federal officials, were outraged. The whole episode, they said, was just another example of the imperious U.S. riding roughshod over Canada.

At one point last week, as the Polar Sea churned its way through the waterway, encountering ice 18 feet thick at some points, the nationalistic Council of Canadians chartered a Twin Otter aircraft to drop a flag-wrapped canister filled with protest leaflets on the icebreaker`s deck.

Briefly fueling further Canadian anger were radio reports suggesting the ship might be planning to conduct experiments involved with antisubmarine warfare. The U.S. flatly denied this, but did say the ship would be gathering ice and weather data for scientific use.

The person perhaps left in the most delicate position by the whole flap was Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who had made better relations with Washington one of his new government`s key platforms. Mulroney, currently on vacation, has declined public comment on the incident, though the press has been quick to dust off his earlier glowing remarks about a new U.S.-Canadian era of ``mutual reliance and respect`` and friendlier ties.

At the same time, a spokesman for the prime minister said last week that the issue of Canada`s Arctic sovereignty almost certainly will be brought up at a high-level Cabinet meeting this week in Vancouver.

With the Polar Sea now in U.S. territorial waters off Alaska, there is no action the Canadian government can take except, perhaps, to take the issue of Arctic sovereignty to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The danger in this, from the Canadian viewpoint, is that Ottawa could lose.

External Affairs Minister Joe Clark, acknowledging this dilemma, said government lawyers had told him that Canada has a ``pretty good case`` but

``I`m not satisfied yet and I`m frankly not going to be panicked prematurely.``

Also coloring debate is the question raised by Liberal critic Jean Chretien: If you let the Americans use the waterway, does that mean the Soviets are entitled to use it too?

``If we want the passage to stay within the control of the West,``

Chretien said, ``it must be Canadian . . . because if (it is) international waters, it`s all right for the Russians to be there.``

U.S. Ambassador Paul Robinson, who will soon complete his tour of duty in Ottawa, indicated that Washington would take a dim view of the Soviets trying to use the waterway. Though he stressed that Arctic sovereignty was a question for lawyers and that the Polar Sea voyage had not been intended to challenge Canada on the question of who could use the passage, he said, ``We have other security concerns that would naturally involve the Soviet Union.``

The only certainty in the whole dispute now is that Mulroney will come in for heated questioning on the Polar Sea episode when Parliament resumes next month.

``The United States is Canada`s best friend,`` Liberal leader John Turner said last week. ``Surely we are not afraid to tell our friends when they have made a bad mistake.``